Heide Museum of Modern Art presents two important exhibitions this February, originally intended to coincide with the museum’s 40th anniversary in late 2021, a major thematic respective of renowned Australian modernist Sidney Nolan and a new work by Dean Cross in response to Nolan.
Featuring key works, including several well-known masterpieces, Sidney Nolan: Search for Paradise surveys Nolan’s career from a fresh perspective, and pays tribute to this central figure in the history of the museum and the lives of its founders, John and Sunday Reed.
For Nolan, Heide was a garden of Eden, that he later saw as a season in hell, where his life-long fascination with the elusive notion of paradise and the consequences of its loss began. From his nostalgia for St Kilda, his childhood heaven, to his explorations of the Australian landscape and restless journeys abroad, Sidney Nolan: Search for Paradise examines one f the artist’s deepest impulses and journey of self-discovery it engendered.
Celebrated inter-disciplinary artist Dean Cross presents a contemporary response to Nolan’s legacy in Sometimes I Miss the Applause, a new Heide commission and dual channel moving image work that confronts, complicates and rebalances dominant modernist cultural and social histories. Using performance Cross inserts himself, and by association First Nations perspectives into the mythologies that Nolan set out to re-examine shifting and providing a contemporary perspective and context to appropriated and overwritten histories, perennial human questions and artistic concerns shared between two artists across generations.
Exhibition opens February 19 and closes June 12.
Heide Museum of Modern Art
7 Templestowe Rd., Bulleen

MUMA
This major survey brings together over 199 art works drawn from six decades of the artist’s practice.
Opening with Binn’s infamous 1967 exhibition at Sydney’s Watters Gallery, the survey traces the collaborative and community projects that spanned two decades of her early career and reveals a sustained painting practice that continues to explore the canvas as a surface on and through which to consider the intersecting complexities of process, patterning relationships and time.
Exhibition opens Monday February 7
Monash University Museum of Art
Building F
Caulfield Campus ,Princes Hwy
Caulfield.

Art Space
Becoming Home: Stories of Chinese Australians
Taking the history of one of Maroondah’s significant local public places as a starting point. Becoming Home explores connections to the Chinese-Australian community through a creative collaboration between project participants Jenny Zhuang, flora Wu, Leo Ren, Lesley Lowe (nee Cheong) and Paul Cheong and curator Tammy Wong Hulbert, contemporary artist Siying Zhou and sound artist Ai Yamamoto.
the project explores ways that Chinese-Australians have made Maroondah their home through a journey of migration and finding an ideal place to live. Becoming Home also investigates the Cheong Family which settled in Croydon in the late 19th Century and donated land for public use.
A public forum with presentations by the artists and architectural historian Natica Schmeser will take place on Saturday March 5.
Exhibition opens February 1 and closes March 20.
Art Space at Realm
179 Maroondah Hwy
Ringwood

Peter Kemp